Contemporary Photography

Tag Archives: Reference Points

When you run out of West, head North. The hunger to see the edges of America drew photographer Ben Huff to the Dalton highway, a storied stretch of road along the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. Over the course of five years, Huff fueled up his truck at home in Fairbanks and drove north to photograph the path to the most remote reaches of the U.S. – and confront the clash between breathtaking wilderness and industrial ambition. “Everything that I was struggling with or trying to find was encapsulated in this one 500 mile stretch of road,” Huff said.

The Dalton Highway was first known as simply The Haul Road, a groove worn into the tundra by fleets of tankers on their way up and back from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field. It was eventually named the Dalton Highway after an oil engineer in the 1980s, and about a decade later, it was opened to public traffic.

Huff became enchanted with the road on a day trip to the Arctic Circle with his wife when they first moved to Fairbanks. Though an impressive gateway to the earth’s frozen north, the Circle is only one-quarter of the way up to the end of the road. The question remained, “What else is up there?”

The answer is both “not much” and “everything,” depending on how you look at it. When pushing past latitudes where sunrise and sunset defy the conventions of time, with no cell phone service or basic amenities for hundreds of miles, reference points for regular life skitter away. “Nothing can kind of prepare you for seeing sunsets on the North Slope,” Huff said. “The alpenglow and the space and the quiet. The quiet is just unnerving.”

Huff encountered not only the truckers (now simultaneously mythologized and de-mystified by shows like Ice Road Truckers) but a fascinating parade of drivers and dreamers who were on a similar quest. “Everyone’s tired, everyone’s seeing this heartbreakingly beautiful landscape. No one’s showered, everyone’s eating out of a cooler or freeze-dried stuff. We’re just dirty and on the same path,” he said. “There was a point where the portraits started to feel a little bit like self portraits, in a way.”

Huff’s photographs took shape not by a need to encapsulate the enormity of his surroundings, but by the curious experience of seeing it through a windshield. The frames are narrow, and the landscapes, however ecstatic, are almost always defined by a slice of road. “I struggled with the space for so long and finally I kind of resigned myself to the fact that I was trying to do the impossible,” he said. “I was never going to really ever going to communicate the space that is up there.”

After five years of driving through all seasons and all states of mind, Huff said he left the project with more questions than answers. “It would be easy to go on the road and make a sort of political stance against oil, against the pipeline, against a road through that environment,” he said. “But I was fortunate to spend five years running that road. I put countless gallons of gas in my car to do it. I saw things I’m incredibly grateful for.”

In a place where Wal-Marts and McDonald’s are now as ubiquitous as sourdoughs and homesteaders once were, the highway embodies the confounding nature of the 49th State. “Even though it’s a beautiful landscape, and it’s beautiful light, and it’s Alaska, and it’s the arctic,” Huff said. “You’re still standing in the middle of a road.”

Ben Huff is an Alaska-based photographer. His work will be exhibited in February at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, his current home. The photographs are also collected in a new book, The Last Road North.

What should we be looking at? The extraordinary number of photographs taken on September 11 made it the most photographed event in history and may have signaled the birth of citizen journalism. However in our impulse to record, we have not formulated new strategies to gain a better understanding of today’s pressing issues of a globalized world.

As traditional print journalism was threatened, and the number of images published online has exploded into the billions (sixty billion on Facebook alone), we have been left with few common sources of news and analysis. There is no longer a “front page” to act as a societal filter through which, we can learn about important events and trends. Even the role that the physical café once played in our communities—the place we went to discuss and digest what’s going on around us — has become fragmented across a myriad of virtual spaces.

Where should we turn for our information? How can we function as a society with so few common reference points? How can we intelligently sort through all the images and information available to us? In terms of photography and visual information, what should we be looking at?

Ten years post-9/11, at a time when we are more overloaded with information than ever but cannot access it in a coherent manner, Aperture will create a visual café for collective social engagement with the question: What Matter’s Now? and turn it into an evolving exhibition space. During a two-week period Aperture will turn itself “inside out,” letting participants engage in the editorial process of weighing questions, ideas, and images, and proposing conceptual and curatorial solutions. Both invited guests and gallery visitors will be asked to participate. The exhibition What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page will combine the crowd sourcing of images and ideas with the curatorial engagement of six experienced individuals, each hosting a table and a conversation within the space, where on corresponding walls each group will present its proposals for the contents of a ‘New Front Page’. Hosts include a variety of visual image specialists: Wafaa Bilal, Melissa Harris, Stephen Mayes, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Ritchin (who conceptualized this project) andDeborah Willis.

As the exhibition opens, each of the hosts will have a designated space, but the walls will be empty. Progressively throughout the first two weeks of the “exhibition,” the walls will be filled in whatever manner each table decides. As the exhibition emerges, its contents will be posted online, daily, via a dedicated blog, as well as via Facebook and Twitter, at aperture.org/whatmattersnow and#whatmattersnow; allowing remote participants to respond and to create a seventh wall dedicated to ideas from the public. This website will go live prior to the opening of the exhibition.

Computers, printers, phones and iPads will be used by hosts and audience members for the duration of the exhibition. Materials may be printed, projected, hung and even destroyed as the exhibition progresses. Hosts might decide that what we should all be looking at is a particular Renaissance painting, or the work of particular photojournalists, or a thousand mini print-outs of images sourced online—or nothing at all. Contributions will be solicited from people around the world who are not able to visit in person. By sending files to dedicated email addresses set up for each table, as well as a general account, remote participants will be able to add their suggestions of imagery, multimedia projects and websites as part of the exhibition in-process.

Printed work in this exhibition will be made onsite, made possible by the generous support of Canon, using Canon image PROGRAF iPF6350 large format printers.

Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist and an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He specializes in online performative and interactive works. His current project, the 3rdi, features a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head transmitting images to the web.

Stephen Mayes has worked with photography, art and journalism for 25 years. He is currently Managing Director of VII Photo, representing some of the world’s leading photojournalists, and continues to maintain his assignment as co-Secretary to the World Press Photo competition. Stephen regularly writes and broadcasts on the ethics and realities of photographic practice.